How would this network protect itself against spambots? Is there any sort of reputation system or barrier to entry that would be fine for an average user but annoying to bot operators?

The state of the Internet today is a people problem, not a tech problem, and trying to throw more tech at it won't solve anything.

despite having "OS" in the name, it has nothing to do with operating systems.

It's a local node.js app you run, which connects to their own mesh network, and somehow fetches the user data from the P2P mesh.

The P2P mesh is supposed to be uniform, "No masters, no workers, no special hardware" - but later in the README, they mention (1) users paying for storage and bandwidth (2) other users hosting the servers at their home using two different hardware classes. So it seems there is a pretty clear client/server distinction - even if the code is identical, the functions are not.

It is not clear how the data is stored - if I add a gigabyte of photos and then close the lid of my laptop, who is storing those? Do I choose specific nodes I trust, or is it assigned randomly? How much so I need to pay them for this? What if they turn off the server, do I lose all the data?

There is your usual "your identity is your keypair" deal, this time they recommend a USB stick for this, created from 24-word keyphrase. The good news is it makes the backup easy. The bad news is anytime you leave it unattended, someone else could copy your keys.

Just like with all other distributed systems of this sort, if you either lose your key (and have no backups), or someone else steals it, you lose control of your account forever and there is no way to recover.

There is its own cryptocurrency (of course!), which you can use to buy "Compute time, Storage, Streaming, Content from creators".

There is AI support of course, you can get paid for providing hardware which can run AI, and you can pay to run your queries on someone else's machines.

And infested with shitcoin. Shitcoin was soo, early 2020s.

And its even worse, its Musk's dogecoin ilk.

What a way to kill a project before even starting it.